2. The Chart in the Basement
The Chart in the Basement
Ray Dominguez came to my courtyard on the Tuesday with his hat in his hand and a request he was not authorized to make.
"The county's got one forensic odontologist," he said.
"One. He's in Ventura, he's sixty-eight, and he's booked into July, and he's good, and we'll get him, and everything that matters will go through him and be done properly.
" He turned the hat around. "But Doc, that's ten weeks.
And I've got partial remains off a bluff with no missing person attached to them and a coroner who can tell me female, twenty to thirty, and dead a long time, and that is all I've got, and I would very much like to know what name to put on a file before July. "
"Ray."
"Unofficial. Nothing you say goes in a report, nothing you touch, nothing you sign.
" He sat down at the iron table without being asked, which is how I knew it was costing him.
"There's a piece of upper jaw with three teeth in it and a filling in one of them.
And you told me once, in this courtyard, with a coffee cake in front of you, that you can look at dental work and say where and when it was done.
" He looked up. "I've got the photographs.
I'm not asking you to identify anybody. I'm asking you where and when. "
I looked at the photographs on his tablet for about ninety seconds.
"Mid-nineties," I said. "Ninety-three to ninety-nine, and I'd bet on the back half of that.
It's a hybrid composite — that material and that technique went out around the turn of the century.
Look at the margin here: there's an overhang and it's been polished back rather than replaced, which is what you do when you're working fast and cheap and you care anyway.
" I zoomed. My heart was doing something.
"And this one — this is the thing, Ray. Look at the tooth itself, not the filling.
That's not decay. Lateral incisors don't decay like that.
That's a fracture that's been restored. Somebody broke that tooth and somebody else fixed it. "
Ray Dominguez went very still.
"Broke it how?"
"That's not my call, and don't write it down, and don't quote me, and get the odontologist." I put the tablet down. "But a mesial-incisal fracture of an upper lateral is what you get from a direct blow to the front of the face. You don't do that eating. You do it in a car, or a fall, or a fist."
Neither of us said anything for a second.
"And the work," I said. "Ray, the work is local, and it's cheap materials done well, and there were maybe six dentists in this town in 1997 doing composites on people who couldn't pay for crowns.
Four of them are dead." I heard my own voice from a distance.
"One of them retired to Bakersfield. And one of them bought a building on Anacapa Street in 1984 and filed everything he ever did in the basement and has never thrown a single piece of paper away in his life. "
Ray Dominguez put his hat back on.
"How long," he said, "would it take you to look."
It took two days and it nearly ended me.
Walt Ostrander's basement filing is alphabetical by surname and organized by a system that exists entirely inside Walt Ostrander.
The active charts got digitized in my first year.
The inactive ones — the dead, the moved-away, the forty-year tail of a general practice in a town people leave — are four gray cabinets and eleven banker's boxes and, in the corner, a card index that Walt maintained by hand from 1984 to 2003 and then abandoned for a computer he never learned.
I could not search by name, because I did not have a name.
So I searched by tooth.
I sat on the basement floor of my own building for two days with a flashlight and a dog and a photograph of a dead woman's upper jaw, and I pulled every inactive chart from 1993 to 2000 with a restoration on an anterior tooth, and there were, in the end, ninety-one of them.
Floss lay in the doorway with her chin on the sill and sighed at me periodically.
Marisol brought sandwiches down and went away again and said nothing, which from Marisol is a form of prayer.
Ninety-one charts. Of those, thirty-four were men.
Of the remaining fifty-seven, twenty-eight were the wrong age in 1998 — children, or women born before 1950.
Of the twenty-nine left, most were patients I could account for: Adele Whitcombe's late sister.
A woman I'd cleaned teeth for last month.
A dozen people who had simply moved away in the ordinary manner of the world.
I found her at four-forty on the Thursday afternoon.
MARSH, CASEY R. — DOB 4/11/1976. The folder was thin. Six visits between 1994 and 1998 and nothing after that, which is not unusual; people stop coming all the time, and the not-coming is never a story until it is.
And clipped inside the cover, a small periapical radiograph, yellowed at the edges, of an upper left lateral incisor with a restored mesial-incisal fracture, and a bitewing, and Walt's handwriting on the chart sheet in blue ballpoint:
*11/3/98. UL2 fx mesial-incisal, trauma. Pt states fall. Composite placed same visit. Pt v. quiet today. Bruising L mandible — pt declined to discuss. Adv. f/u 2 wks. Pt anxious. — WO*
I sat on the floor of the basement with that chart in my lap for a long time.
Because I had seen that last phrase before.
I had seen it a hundred times in that basement, in that hand, on forty years of charts — *pt anxious*, Walt's private shorthand, the two words he wrote when a patient came in with something he could see and couldn't ask about.
And I had heard him tell me what those two words cost him, in this courtyard, on a Saturday in August three and a half years ago, with a coffee cake in front of him and a dog on his feet, when he said: *she isn't the first patient I've lost who didn't add up. *
I had written it down that night on the back of a pink message slip and put it in my desk drawer, and it had stayed there for two years and four months, and I got up off the basement floor and went upstairs and opened the drawer and it was still there.
Then I called Ray Dominguez, and then I called Nate, and then I sat down on the floor of my own office with my dog against my back and looked up Casey Marsh on the internet.
It took eleven seconds.
*MISSING — Casey Renee Marsh, 22, of Santa Barbara. Last seen November 14, 1998, leaving her place of employment on Stearns Wharf. 5'4", brown hair. Anyone with information...*
There were four newspaper items in total across twenty-eight years. The first was six paragraphs in November 1998. The second was three paragraphs in February 1999 and contained the sentence that decided the rest of my spring, attributed to a Santa Barbara Police Department spokesman:
*Investigators do not suspect foul play. Marsh had reportedly discussed leaving the area.*
And the fourth, from 2018, on the twentieth anniversary, was a single photograph of a woman named Rosalind Marsh standing on the sidewalk outside a house on the Westside holding a framed picture of her daughter, under the headline TWENTY YEARS LATER, A MOTHER STILL WAITS.
I looked at that photograph for a while.
Then I went downstairs, and out into the courtyard, and stood in the dark by the fountain that doesn't work, and called Walt Ostrander at nine o'clock at night, which I had never done in four years.
He picked up on the second ring. He sounded like a man who had been sitting by a telephone.
"Lila," said Walt Ostrander.
"Walt," I said. "I found a chart."
There was a long silence on the line. Long enough that I heard his television go off.
"Casey," he said.